


not a tragedy

by oneese



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5231168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneese/pseuds/oneese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>everyone dies, not everyone lives. </p><p>(or<br/>soulmates who find each other again in every life they live,<br/>but never find quite the happy ending)</p>
            </blockquote>





	not a tragedy

**Author's Note:**

> tw: talk about death/illness/loss
> 
> (crossposted to tumblr)

Alex doesn’t remember his first life, or his second or his tenth.

The moment you have lived too many lives in too little time, everything blurs and comes together to become one big memory you don’t really want to remember. He doesn’t know why it started or how it has kept going, but he knows that he’s stuck in one vicious cycle, that changes and twists and rewrites its ending each time.

There’s one constant he does want to remember. One person that he meets again and again and again – Ross.

Sometimes they meet in mere months, other times it takes years, but they gravitate towards each other every single time. As if their atoms complement one another, belong together, connected by linked hands and meeting mouths, by fingers tangled in hair and hips pressed together. 

They’re drawn towards each other. Their jobs change and their names differ and they never know who they are once they get launched into a different life, having to adapt to another man, who they are when they look into the mirror, but never actually feel like.

As if they’re made from the same material and just ripped apart in some cruel turn of events. As if they’re soulmates, although Alex doesn’t really believe in that – would they be separated each time if they were meant to be together? 

+

In this life, it takes them two decades to find each other again.

Alex is a Spartan soldier at war with the Roman empire. It’s not something he ever saw himself doing, but it lends him enough freedom to travel, to meet new people, to search for his one constant, the person he’s suppose to find again. 

In this life, however, it’s the first time his hands are covered in blood from anyone, but Ross and it’s a foreign feeling. They never really had to live in times of war and he counts himself lucky for it.

He remembers reading about the great battles, of the Persians, Egyptians and Greeks alike, in the library of Alexandria, when he was the child of an Egyptian advisor and Ross was a slave, who couldn’t even dream of being able to read or write. He remembers how he thanked every God and Goddess he was made to believe in over decades and decades of different lives with different religions.

Every time a person, comrade; enemy, dies around him in this life, all he can only see flashes of the past. All he can think of is dark hair matted with blood, blue eyes that turn to grey, and skin that fades to ash. He can only pluck at the shards of hope that seem to get stuck underneath his skin before dissolving when another day goes by without meeting familiar eyes and feeling whole.

Every time his sword pierces skin or his dagger hits target, he wonders. He wonders if he just completed someone else’s cycle, rewrote it and sent them both on their way. He wonders if they see red too every time, even though the color seems so distant now.

He’s still looking for Ross and he feels like their time is limited. It has never taken quite this long. The war goes by and the fragile hope, that he holds in the palms of his hands, gets crushed beneath the weight of the sands of time and days filled with a different constant – this time that is the constant of the soldiers marching into another battle.

He finally meets Ross when he least wants to encounter him. It’s not that he is not happy to finally come across him. It’s not that he doesn’t feel complete when their eyes lock, but it is the moment. It is a mix of wrong place and wrong time, wrong everything.

It is Alex plunging his sword forwards without looking, the appeal of dead bodies and bleeding flesh faded years before. It is Alex stabbing Ross between the ribs and having him die yet another time in his arms. It is feeling complete for a moment before it all gets taken away by a cruel force that some would call fate, but he doesn’t want to name.

Alex clutches at Ross’ tunic, tries to see the wound but the fabric has already gone too deeply crimson for it to mean anything but death. Tears drip down his cheeks and Ross just blinks – watery smile and watery gaze –, as he always does.

‘’We will find each other again.’’ Alex whispers against Ross’ cheek, as he always does.

Somehow having this man’s blood on his armor, on his hands, coating his fingertips, feels eerily like coming home and he hasn’t got a moment to think about how twisted up that is. 

Alex sees red.

+

The nurse hands him the file the second week he has been working in the hospital. He has seen the nurse before as well. The lines of his face are familiar and when he introduces himself as ‘Chris Trott’ it clicks in Alex’ mind.

Ross is his biggest constant. Ross is the man he has fallen in love with over a hundred of times, will fall in love with so many more.

If he had to describe his life as a galaxy, wax poetry as the poet he was at one point, then he would say Ross is his sun. The point, the person, his life rotates around. Ross would be his sun and he would be just another planet.

But, he thinks – thinks Neruda, thinks Poe, thinks Plath, thinks Rumi – that maybe during those strings of lives he has gathered enough stars to fit in his own personal sky. Little blinking comets that are there for a moment before you lose them out of your sight. Little lights you will see for a moment, will disappear for another and return for the next.

That’s how he thinks about the faces he sometimes recognizes. He has seen Chris before and he has seen the receptionist of the hospital, Kim, in the Middle Ages. He has fought alongside the night janitor, Lovasz, and butted heads over a cup of tea with the head of the board, Lewis.

It’s why their meeting shouldn’t have surprised him as much as it does (maybe, just maybe, because he had hoped in this life he would meet Ross just in the streets, not at his work – maybe, just maybe, because he thought this life would be different).

Alex opens the file Chris hands him and his heart stops. Ross’ grinning face stares back at him from the page and he thinks that he looks entirely too happy for a man whose lungs don’t work anymore.

‘’Hornby, Ross. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stage three.’’ He reads out loud. There’s no cure for that, he knows, the knowledge burnt into his brain in this life.

Chris nudges his side as if to spur him on, to open the door they are hovering in front of. If it was anyone else, Alex thinks he would have snapped at them, except that the nudge beneath his ribs breaks him out of his haze (thinks: Greek battle fields, blood on his hands, blood on his armor, blood staining the ground, dripping into the cracks, red).

He can’t mourn someone who hasn’t died yet, so he puts his hand on the door knob, turns it and walks in. Ross’ face lights up, even when he looks pale and small against the pristine sheets of the hospital bed, and he beams at him.

‘’Was wondering when you would show up.’’ Ross says, his voice hoarse and slow and Alex thinks, bitterly, that is what COPD does to its victim.

In this life, Alex is Ross’ doctor, but he wishes he wasn’t the one to deliver this devastating news to him. Although, from the turn of Ross’ eyebrows and lips, he’s pretty sure Ross already knows just as well that this (he) is not meant to have a happy ending.

Alex steps closer to the bed and Ross just keeps on smiling and this is not fair. He covers the distance between them in a second, presses a closed mouth kiss against his temple and then on his nose before meeting his mouth. He ignores Chris’ gasp behind him and instead frames the other’s face, too thin; cheekbones too prominent in his face, with both his hands.

‘’I always find you again, remember?’’ He closes his eyes as he breathes out the words against Ross’ forehead, feels him nod more than he sees him do it.

The next few weeks are exactly what Alex knew they were going to be. Ross is fighting, but it is a battle that has already been decided before it even began. There is no cure for COPD, only medicine that slows the destruction process of the lungs down.

Ross takes them, always only when Alex is the one to give them to him – always only Alex, but they aren’t doing anything but stretching the little bit of time he still has left. Making a month, a month and a half, but still leaving him in bits and pieces by the beginning of the last week.

Alex doesn’t tell him that it’s his last week, but they both know it. It’s always inevitable. Ross dies, Ross leaves and Alex gets left behind and then he sees red. Then they start another life, trying to find one another again before the inevitable happens once again.

He spends all his breaks and every spare moment he has at Ross’ bedside. They recount stories of their past lives, of lives where they got older than they are now, where they had time to buy a house together or introduce each other to their families. Alex laughs more than he cries and that’s mostly because every time he feels like a tearing up, Ross presses his hands (so slowly now, fragile bones beneath thin skin) against his face and tells him to ‘cheer up now, mate, because remember when –’.

Alex laughs more than he cries in those last few weeks, but the moment Ross starts waking up every night, coughing up blood and leaving his sheets stained for the nurses to change, is when he finally realizes that their time together never should be this short.

It’s been five weeks, and it has been shorter – he knows, but somehow this is even worse. In this life, they had time to fall in love all over again. Telling each other stories about their lives here before they met again and sharing gentle kisses in Ross’ hospital room. In this life, Alex can see Ross fall apart all over again when he doesn’t deserve it (wants to scream ‘is this fair’ but he knows the answer).

They hold hands that night (atoms connected by linked hands) until Ross’ grip lessens and lessens and lessens, before becoming slack. Alex looks at him, hates the antiseptic smell of the hospital for the first time, and smiles through the tears (not for himself, but for Ross who blinks at him with glazed over eyes - as he always does).

‘’We will find each other again.’’ He whispers, as he always does. His hand still gripping Ross’ even though his fingers are going white at the edges, suddenly not such a stark contrast with Ross’ skin anymore.

The line on the heart monitor, that Ross has been hooked up to for weeks now, finally goes flat then and it feels like ice is running down the back of his neck, along his spine. Everything feels unnaturally cold for a bit (his fingers intertwined with a dead man’s, the blood running through his veins, his heart) and then – 

He sees red. 

+

So it goes each time, every life. 

They spend time, sometimes decades and sometimes only days, looking for each other, only to find the same end in different settings. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they live at the time, because both Alex and Ross knows that each time, may it take years or minutes after meeting, their story ends like a tragedy. 

A tragedy (think Homer, think Trissino, think Shakespeare, think Corneille) that was designed to not be anything but a failed love story. A lesson for the mass, even though they can never share their experience, can never tell others ‘be careful with what you got’ and have a reason behind it (– so maybe, perhaps; somehow, for a reason unknown, only a lesson for the two of them). 

Alex’ favorite life is when he’s a bartender in his own café and Ross is a regular customer. They drink together under the comfort of the dark, the people around them don’t know their names and have no intention of learning them. Alex likes this life because most of his days are filled with Ross; Ross and falling in love with him again. Alex likes this life because Ross stays alive long enough for him to wear a ring on his finger and to buy a two story house together. They share stories and compliments and kisses on the couch in their living room and celebrate together when Alex’ café gets sold. It’s heart failure that makes him see red in the end. 

Alex’ least favorite life is when he is a funeral director and in that life he doesn’t even get to see Ross’ eyes. He doesn’t get to see the other long at all. He gets lowered into the ground too quickly and Alex struggles with his words as he talks to Ross’ family. He wants to say ‘I understand’ or ‘it will be alright’, but the words don’t come out – in this life they hadn’t known each other. He stays behind a little longer that day, watches the fresh grave and says the words he always means – sees red. 

When he asks Ross one time if he thinks that’s all they are, a tragedy, Ross looks at him a little strangely with coal dust on his brow, he’s a miner in this life after all. He says, with his shoulders hunched and lines around his mouth and eyes (fate hasn’t been kind to them this time – just keep digging), ‘’True tragedy would be not finding each other again, don’t you think, Smith?’’ And that hits home, digs a little too deep (maybe fate was right to make Ross a miner this life). The mine shaft collapses the next day and that world too bleeds into red. 

+

Alex is a YouTuber this time around. In this life, he’s a let’s player, Alsmiffy. He thinks that this is the life that was really meant for them. He loves this life. He loves the work he does and the friends he has made and he loves the fanbase that feels a little bit more like a virtual family than an audience with no face.

He has known Ross for years in this life and they have worked together so closely for so long that it feels a little bit like a dream. Their days are filled with jokes and laughter, playing video games with people they recognize from one past life and another. Their days are sharing quick kisses off camera and glances on camera. Their days are sharing blankets in one of their apartments while watching movies, that probably had no budget at all. Their days are easy in this life, good. 

They both don’t realize this life is anything out of the ordinary at first. They don’t realize that this will be the end, the last, until the day Alex falls ill. They have done it all, they have had steady entertainments careers for as long as they could and their skin is getting wrinkly and old – Alex thinks it’s the longest they have ever lived. 

Alex falls ill in a slow and soft way, quietly and at first they don’t think his cough is anything out of the ordinary, until one morning he can’t move his left arm and his vision becomes blurry every time he tries to move. It’s an illness that creeps up on them instead of coming down to crash onto their shoulders. 

It is then that the pattern they have gotten so familiar with breaks apart, falls into dozens of pieces (unfixable shards of hope that get stuck underneath their skin – don’t dissolve this time). Alex is never the one who dies, but maybe it is time for a change – maybe it’s an end. 

And Ross, who isn’t use to being left behind (always being the one leaving) tries his best to keep it (them) from falling apart. Ross tries with all his might to stop Alex from breaking, tries to be the glue to keep them going; gripping his hand as if his hold is enough to keep him there (it’s not).

‘’We will find each other again.’’ He whispers against the nape of Alex’ neck, as he has never done before, but Alex shakes his head. He shoots him a smile that seems made of porcelain (somehow doesn't break), squeezes his hand back and says, ‘’No, not this time.’’

And this time – 

Alex sees white. 

(Maybe they never were such a tragedy after all).

**Author's Note:**

> hope u enjoyed !!


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